The Jewish Writings by Arendt Hannah

Author:Arendt, Hannah. [Arendt, Hannah]
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49628-7
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2009-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

On the “Salt of the Earth”:

Waldo Frank's “Jewish Interpretation”

September 22, 1944

No critique can demolish an ideology more utterly than its complete enactment. In the fullness of its flowering, the ideology reaches such an apex of absurdity that its credibility sinks to nothing. Precisely when it presents itself most purely, untroubled by any historical fact or any ideal truth out of which it once emerged, just then the ground crumbles from beneath its feet, because it has continued to interpret itself on its own authority alone.

It seems that an old and at one time widespread Jewish ideology is reaching this final stage of corruption. This false doctrine probably arose from the collapse of the Shabetai Tzevi movement and the loss of its messianic hopes, and was lovingly cultivated all through the nineteenth century, particularly in the emancipated countries. The doctrine secularizes the religious pretension of Israel to being the chosen people, frees that status from all observance of the Law and all hope for the Messiah, renders it absolute, and so equates Judaism with whatever fashion dictates is good and beautiful and admired by the age.

What occasioned this ideology was the need to justify the Jewish Diaspora, something that had been suffered as an affliction for millennia, since despair over the false Messiah had swept away the ancient hopes for redemption and a return to Palestine. This element of justifying the Diaspora and rendering it permanent was particularly convenient for the nineteenth century. For here an authentic possibility presented itself of making every country in Europe home without at the same time surrendering Jewish identity. What resulted from this much-varied theorem was a doctrine that takes the Jews to be “the salt of the earth,” a sort of incarnation of humanity, and in which all the persecution they suffer becomes a symbol of the sinfulness of the non-Jewish peoples or an expression of their unpreparedness for the actual vocation of mankind.

Depending on the accidental worldview of the author, Judaism could be identified either with progress or with resistance to corrosive change, either with Enlightenment or with the preservation of religious piety. Jews could be understood as born proletarians, as natural allies of the bourgeoisie, or as the oldest Western aristocracy. Wherever convenient they could appear as the incarnation of justice or the incarnation of free competition of forces or the incarnation of nobility itself. In each case Jews were these incarnations and not mere mortals.

Naturally, Jewish nationalism is not essentially different from other sorts of nationalism. It is always the same story: general human qualities, general human tasks are claimed as the monopoly of a particular people by maintaining that this particular people has been exclusively chosen to administer these general values. The crucial point is always that—in the terms of the latest Jewish nationalists—” the idea becomes flesh,” and so the determinate people are principally, that is, ideally, separated from all other people. Jewish nationalism differs from other sorts of nationalism only in having the added absurdity of being primarily

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